Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery vs Fastly DDoS Protection: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery

Mid-market and enterprise teams streaming video at scale need Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery for its 100% availability SLA and edge-native content control, which eliminates the operational overhead of managing origin failover and geographic access policies yourself. The platform's serverless edge compute and intelligent caching stack mean you're not paying for unused capacity or dealing with origin overload during traffic spikes. Skip this if your primary concern is DDoS mitigation rather than delivery reliability; Akamai excels at keeping streams live, not at stopping volumetric attacks before they reach your edge.

Fastly DDoS Protection

Teams operating high-traffic APIs and web applications will get the most from Fastly DDoS Protection because its pay-for-legitimate-traffic model removes the financial penalty for false positives that tanks ROI on other DDoS services. The 497+ Tbps absorption capacity and adaptive engine handle synchronized multi-vector attacks without manual rule tuning, which matters if your ops team is already underwater. Skip this if you need post-attack forensics and recovery orchestration; Fastly prioritizes real-time mitigation over the investigation side of the incident lifecycle.